Fanfic - Solutions, Part 5
Title: Solutions
Author: me
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Abner, Conrad, Paradox, Toni
Chapters: 5/5
FYI: Based on LARP between Hughes and I. In this RP, Abner has moved in with Conrad in an attempt to both keep an eye on him and to find Adelaide. Lately, though, Conrad's behaviour has been strange...
Conrad stopped eating entirely.
At first, Abner was content to let him do as he wanted. He and Paradox went out during the day, to the grocer’s or the hardware store, and Abner tried not to think about how it was all right, because he trusted Conrad to stay put as much as he trusted Conrad’s friends not to be smart enough to know when to attack.
He also tried not to think about what level of responsibility he’d have if Conrad’s friends did break into the condo and managed to wake Conrad during the day.
Because they’d probably die.
But they didn’t come, no-one came, not Adelaide or Worth or Hanna, and Conrad was left on his own.
With each passing sunset, the vampire’s skin became tighter. His cheekbones became more prominent, his eye sockets sunken until he looked like a parody of his doctor. He still had all his hair, but his clothes hung on him, twice as big as they should’ve been. And the quiet. That was the most unnerving. Conrad spent the entirety of every night on the couch, arms locked around his knees, and said nothing.
Abner didn’t want to admit it, but even for him the situation was disturbing. Conrad’s slow degradation was starting to wear on him, like having to listen to fingernails being dragged across a never-ending chalkboard. He wasn’t cruel by nature; he was merely practical. But torture had never been one of his tactics. You didn’t torture a rabid dog, you killed it. You didn’t watch it starve to death in a cage just because you wanted to call the observation “scientific.” His fingers strayed to his gun, stroking the stock absently. He wouldn’t hesitate to put down a dog, especially one that was hurting itself. Why was he hesitating now? There was nothing more to gain.
He found himself staying in then, passing the daylight hours on Conrad’s computer, searching for similar problems and possible solutions. Without Conrad, he would have no lead on Adelaide. Without Conrad, he would have to go back to tracking clues down, one by one.
Alone.
But just like Conrad’s friends, nothing appeared to save him.
/ * / * / * / * / * / * /
On the last night, Conrad emerged from his room looking lost. It was the shuffling, aimless walk of the seriously ill, where the change of scenery is supposed to encourage an improvement in health, but doesn’t. He moved toward the couch like an old man afraid of falling.
Paradox couldn’t take it. After trying to sit next to Conrad, he crept into his nesting box - the one that Conrad had dragged home three weeks ago, Abner remembered, with loud exclamations that the rat was not allowed on his couch, and he’d better never catch him there now that he had somewhere to sit - and stayed there.
Suddenly, the vampire whispered, “What’m I gonna tell my mom?”
Abner looked up from his cards. “What do you mean?”
“She can’t see my body like this.” The vampire’s dull brown eyes flicked to Abner’s face. “Maybe I should just eat someone so that I’ll look normal when you kill me.”
“I could burn your remains,” Abner offered, though even to himself it didn’t sound helpful. Paradox clicked once, unhappily.
The vampire fell silent again, gaze tumbling inward. Abner eyed his charge’s - captive’s -- phone. He’d never met Conrad’s mother, but he imagined his own mother having to identify a desiccated corpse, and he had to admit that it would give her no peace. It was too strange to be believed. A healthy, prosperous son, starved to death? It should’ve been impossible. Perhaps… perhaps he should allow a call. Or insist on one. Just in this one instance -
The phone rang as if on cue, shrill in the quiet, and Abner’s hand jumped to his gun.
“Your phone,” he said unnecessarily, forcing his fingers away from the weapon. The vampire didn’t answer, didn’t even acknowledge that Abner had spoken. Abner looked at the flashing screen. He didn’t know the number. But maybe Worth had found a solution. Maybe he could keep Conrad around a bit longer.
He answered it. “Hello?”
There was a pause, then a woman’s voice said, “Conrad? This is Conrad’s number, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Abner said, “but he’s indisposed. May I take a message?”
“Tell him it’s Toni,” the woman said. “I’m almost there. You’re with him, aren’t you? Hanna told me you were. Let me in when I get there. I’d hate to bust his door for nothing.”
“I wouldn’t advise -“
“Almost there,” she repeated, and hung up.
Abner set the phone down and stood. He moved around the table, stopping in front of the sofa. “Toni’s coming,” he told his charge.
Conrad shrugged, a flicker of his old self flashing across his face. “I don’t care. Don’t let her in. I might eat her.”
“I doubt you’d do that.”
“Do you? Because you’re such an expert.” He glared up at Abner, lip curling back to reveal his one sharp fang, fury giving his eyes an artificial brightness. “Do you know what you smell like right now? Do you have any fucking idea how good you smell?”
Abner stared, taken aback. “Me?”
“Yes, you.” The vampire was pushing himself farther into the couch, tendons cording on his sticklike fingers as he clutched his legs. “You smell like - I don’t even know how to tell you. You smell like whatever your mother’s best cooking is. When you’ve been out in the snow all day, and you’re cold and starving and your feet hurt and you can’t wait to get inside because you can smell something so warm and delicious coming from the house that you’ll do anything to go to her. Anything to be warm, anything to just have one bite -“ He broke off, swallowing hard, his dry throat clicking audibly. “Forget it, never mind.”
Abner’s gun was in his hand again. He didn’t remember drawing it.
“Going to shoot me?” The vampire bared the rest of his teeth, but now his voice shook. “Good. Hurry up.”
The Uno. The musicals. The midnight talks about Matthew Broderick and creationism and exactly what went into McDonald’s hamburgers. All this time, watching Conrad suffer, thinking he’d been keeping Conrad company - admit it, that’s what you thought, underneath the ‘study’ excuse, that is what you thought, a death vigil, everyone deserves to have someone with them when they die -- and he’d been dangling himself in front of the vampire, human meat to Conrad’s vampire Tantalus. It was quite possibly the cruelest thing he’d ever done, and he hadn’t even done it intentionally.
Or had he? Exactly who was he thinking about while he was insisting he stay with Conrad?
And did any of that matter? Conrad hadn’t attacked him, but he might. In the next few days, was that when he would finally be hungry enough? Was it right to do it now, when Conrad wasn’t resisting? Put a mahogany bullet through his brain and end the torture?
“I -“
“You what? You WHAT? I was fine before you! I wasn’t hurting anyone! And now - now it’s all I can think about!”
“Mr Achenleck, calm down -“
“Shut up! You don’t know what it’s like! You only know whatever stupid factoids you think makes you an expert. Well fuck you if you think your stupid belief in vampires is going to make me kill you or anyone else. I’m not a monster!”
“Conrad?” The knock on the door was more of a bang, the woman’s voice the only thing that kept Abner from shooting through the wood as he spun to face the noise. “Conrad, let me in! It’s Toni! I’ll break it down if you don’t!”
Conrad clamped his mouth shut, hugging himself and shoving himself so far into the sofa that the springs squeaked.
Abner knew Conrad was a vampire. He knew all vampires had to be eradicated. He knew that no matter what he said now, some day, Conrad would kill. It was just the way it was, Uno or not.
Good man or not, it was just the way it was.
He raised his pistol and took aim.
“Conrad! I swear to God, you’d better open this door right now, or else!”
He hesitated. The woman at the door would hear. She would hear the gunshot, and she knew a strange man had answered the phone. Had the neighbors seen him? He’d been careful, but he couldn’t control everything. Someone might have seen him. More than one someone, possibly. If he shot Conrad now, the body wouldn’t disintegrate - he hadn’t had “real” blood. He would be a body, and she would be a witness, along with anyone else who heard her shouting in the hallway.
He needed to be anonymous. He could not afford a mistake like -
The door smashed open, slamming against the wall, and something blue and wolflike and skeletal boiled through the opening with a snarl. Its aura burned, the magic spilling over his skin like biting insects, and Abner fired twice, falling back to the table, the shots loud in the quiet apartment. The wolf thing looked at him, sneered, and was suddenly small.
“You can’t kill me like that,” the girl said flatly. She reached out and shut the door, which didn’t quite fit anymore, and Abner groped in his pocket for his silver bullets as the smell of cordite seared his nose.
The girl - Toni, of course, she’d said it was Toni - ignored him. The moment the door was closed, she was on the couch, reaching out to touch the vampire’s wasted face. “Oh, Connie. Oh, baby, what’ve you done?”
There was no liquid in him. Conrad couldn’t cry, but he shook his head once, minutely, and tried to pull back. “It wasn’t me. It was the blood. You shouldn’t be here -“
Toni smiled gently, stroking his hair. “My silly boy. It’s okay. Here.” She sat up straighter and swept her long, dark ponytail to one side, tilting her head just as Worth had. “Hurry up.”
Abner gave up on the silver and said loudly, gun up and trained on Conrad, “I can’t allow that.”
The look Toni gave him was blacker than Worth’s, gaze snapping with anger. “Worth told me you’d try to stop me. Get out of here while you still can.”
Abner didn’t move. His hand was steady. “Feeding on people is not allowed. He knows he can’t touch you. And you may kill me, but he’ll be dead first.”
Toni glared. Her hand moved down, deliberately covering one of Conrad’s. “Is a vampire ‘people’? Could he feed on another vampire?”
Conrad moaned, agonized. “Toni, please -“
Abner stared hard, sensing a trap. “Why would it want to? There’s no nutrition in vampire blood. It’s already dead.”
“But he could,” Toni insisted. “Because he’s not ‘people’.”
“There’s no point to this conversation.” Abner cocked the weapon. “Move away, Miss. Humans are off limits.”
“But that’s the point exactly.” Toni grinned, feral and unpleasant. Her teeth seemed to fill her mouth, longer and sharper than human teeth, and her hair lifted, prickling in its own wind of power, the blue streaks flaring. Her voice was deeper, rougher. “I’m not human.”
The air in the room was suddenly heavy and hard to breathe. Abner couldn’t move, and it had nothing to do with Toni’s magic.
Not human.
“He needs to feed from something living. You’re lucky he didn’t pick you. But then - you’re human.”
The vampire hadn’t eaten him because he was human?
His mind spiraled through confusing channels, lost. People ate cows. Wolves ate deer. Birds ate insects. Everything ate something else, that was Nature’s way. But wolves weren’t killed unless they overcame their food source. Birds weren’t killed hardly at all. If vampires kept themselves in check, if they fed on a population that could not be exhausted, that was not human -
He watched as Toni bared her throat to the vampire and patted his hand, her voice gentle and feminine again, though her eyes were still on the vampire hunter. “Come on, honey. You can’t hurt me. Drink.”
Conrad’s eyes were on Toni’s dark skin, fixated. “But he’ll -“
“He won’t do anything,” Toni said. “He doesn’t have a reason.”
Toni was not human. Conrad was not human.
Dreamily, Conrad murmured, “You smell like…”
“I know.”
Abner felt pressure against his leg, and knew it was Paradox. The ferret clambered up his partner, settling on Abner’s shoulder, nuzzling reassuringly against his cheek, small noises bubbling out of him. After a moment, Abner reached up with his free hand and touched Paradox’s warm body. His gun dropped.
Toni nodded slightly, turned fully to the vampire, and pressed his face to her throat.
Conrad gave in.
THE END.
Thanks for reading~! To be truthful, I have more I wrote after this - what happened to Toni after Conrad was through with her, what Abner did about it, how Conrad and Abner said good-bye - but it turned out to be superfluous. The point of the story was Abner’s coming to terms with Conrad in Conrad’s entirety, and that’s where I left it. I’m sorry if anyone was disappointed by the lack of, erm, intimacies between characters. Take consolation in the fact that I reaaaaally wanted to pair Conrad up. ; ^ ;
… maybe I’ll do it anyways. But later.
Hope you enjoyed!
Author: me
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Abner, Conrad, Paradox, Toni
Chapters: 5/5
FYI: Based on LARP between Hughes and I. In this RP, Abner has moved in with Conrad in an attempt to both keep an eye on him and to find Adelaide. Lately, though, Conrad's behaviour has been strange...
Conrad stopped eating entirely.
At first, Abner was content to let him do as he wanted. He and Paradox went out during the day, to the grocer’s or the hardware store, and Abner tried not to think about how it was all right, because he trusted Conrad to stay put as much as he trusted Conrad’s friends not to be smart enough to know when to attack.
He also tried not to think about what level of responsibility he’d have if Conrad’s friends did break into the condo and managed to wake Conrad during the day.
Because they’d probably die.
But they didn’t come, no-one came, not Adelaide or Worth or Hanna, and Conrad was left on his own.
With each passing sunset, the vampire’s skin became tighter. His cheekbones became more prominent, his eye sockets sunken until he looked like a parody of his doctor. He still had all his hair, but his clothes hung on him, twice as big as they should’ve been. And the quiet. That was the most unnerving. Conrad spent the entirety of every night on the couch, arms locked around his knees, and said nothing.
Abner didn’t want to admit it, but even for him the situation was disturbing. Conrad’s slow degradation was starting to wear on him, like having to listen to fingernails being dragged across a never-ending chalkboard. He wasn’t cruel by nature; he was merely practical. But torture had never been one of his tactics. You didn’t torture a rabid dog, you killed it. You didn’t watch it starve to death in a cage just because you wanted to call the observation “scientific.” His fingers strayed to his gun, stroking the stock absently. He wouldn’t hesitate to put down a dog, especially one that was hurting itself. Why was he hesitating now? There was nothing more to gain.
He found himself staying in then, passing the daylight hours on Conrad’s computer, searching for similar problems and possible solutions. Without Conrad, he would have no lead on Adelaide. Without Conrad, he would have to go back to tracking clues down, one by one.
Alone.
But just like Conrad’s friends, nothing appeared to save him.
/ * / * / * / * / * / * /
On the last night, Conrad emerged from his room looking lost. It was the shuffling, aimless walk of the seriously ill, where the change of scenery is supposed to encourage an improvement in health, but doesn’t. He moved toward the couch like an old man afraid of falling.
Paradox couldn’t take it. After trying to sit next to Conrad, he crept into his nesting box - the one that Conrad had dragged home three weeks ago, Abner remembered, with loud exclamations that the rat was not allowed on his couch, and he’d better never catch him there now that he had somewhere to sit - and stayed there.
Suddenly, the vampire whispered, “What’m I gonna tell my mom?”
Abner looked up from his cards. “What do you mean?”
“She can’t see my body like this.” The vampire’s dull brown eyes flicked to Abner’s face. “Maybe I should just eat someone so that I’ll look normal when you kill me.”
“I could burn your remains,” Abner offered, though even to himself it didn’t sound helpful. Paradox clicked once, unhappily.
The vampire fell silent again, gaze tumbling inward. Abner eyed his charge’s - captive’s -- phone. He’d never met Conrad’s mother, but he imagined his own mother having to identify a desiccated corpse, and he had to admit that it would give her no peace. It was too strange to be believed. A healthy, prosperous son, starved to death? It should’ve been impossible. Perhaps… perhaps he should allow a call. Or insist on one. Just in this one instance -
The phone rang as if on cue, shrill in the quiet, and Abner’s hand jumped to his gun.
“Your phone,” he said unnecessarily, forcing his fingers away from the weapon. The vampire didn’t answer, didn’t even acknowledge that Abner had spoken. Abner looked at the flashing screen. He didn’t know the number. But maybe Worth had found a solution. Maybe he could keep Conrad around a bit longer.
He answered it. “Hello?”
There was a pause, then a woman’s voice said, “Conrad? This is Conrad’s number, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Abner said, “but he’s indisposed. May I take a message?”
“Tell him it’s Toni,” the woman said. “I’m almost there. You’re with him, aren’t you? Hanna told me you were. Let me in when I get there. I’d hate to bust his door for nothing.”
“I wouldn’t advise -“
“Almost there,” she repeated, and hung up.
Abner set the phone down and stood. He moved around the table, stopping in front of the sofa. “Toni’s coming,” he told his charge.
Conrad shrugged, a flicker of his old self flashing across his face. “I don’t care. Don’t let her in. I might eat her.”
“I doubt you’d do that.”
“Do you? Because you’re such an expert.” He glared up at Abner, lip curling back to reveal his one sharp fang, fury giving his eyes an artificial brightness. “Do you know what you smell like right now? Do you have any fucking idea how good you smell?”
Abner stared, taken aback. “Me?”
“Yes, you.” The vampire was pushing himself farther into the couch, tendons cording on his sticklike fingers as he clutched his legs. “You smell like - I don’t even know how to tell you. You smell like whatever your mother’s best cooking is. When you’ve been out in the snow all day, and you’re cold and starving and your feet hurt and you can’t wait to get inside because you can smell something so warm and delicious coming from the house that you’ll do anything to go to her. Anything to be warm, anything to just have one bite -“ He broke off, swallowing hard, his dry throat clicking audibly. “Forget it, never mind.”
Abner’s gun was in his hand again. He didn’t remember drawing it.
“Going to shoot me?” The vampire bared the rest of his teeth, but now his voice shook. “Good. Hurry up.”
The Uno. The musicals. The midnight talks about Matthew Broderick and creationism and exactly what went into McDonald’s hamburgers. All this time, watching Conrad suffer, thinking he’d been keeping Conrad company - admit it, that’s what you thought, underneath the ‘study’ excuse, that is what you thought, a death vigil, everyone deserves to have someone with them when they die -- and he’d been dangling himself in front of the vampire, human meat to Conrad’s vampire Tantalus. It was quite possibly the cruelest thing he’d ever done, and he hadn’t even done it intentionally.
Or had he? Exactly who was he thinking about while he was insisting he stay with Conrad?
And did any of that matter? Conrad hadn’t attacked him, but he might. In the next few days, was that when he would finally be hungry enough? Was it right to do it now, when Conrad wasn’t resisting? Put a mahogany bullet through his brain and end the torture?
“I -“
“You what? You WHAT? I was fine before you! I wasn’t hurting anyone! And now - now it’s all I can think about!”
“Mr Achenleck, calm down -“
“Shut up! You don’t know what it’s like! You only know whatever stupid factoids you think makes you an expert. Well fuck you if you think your stupid belief in vampires is going to make me kill you or anyone else. I’m not a monster!”
“Conrad?” The knock on the door was more of a bang, the woman’s voice the only thing that kept Abner from shooting through the wood as he spun to face the noise. “Conrad, let me in! It’s Toni! I’ll break it down if you don’t!”
Conrad clamped his mouth shut, hugging himself and shoving himself so far into the sofa that the springs squeaked.
Abner knew Conrad was a vampire. He knew all vampires had to be eradicated. He knew that no matter what he said now, some day, Conrad would kill. It was just the way it was, Uno or not.
Good man or not, it was just the way it was.
He raised his pistol and took aim.
“Conrad! I swear to God, you’d better open this door right now, or else!”
He hesitated. The woman at the door would hear. She would hear the gunshot, and she knew a strange man had answered the phone. Had the neighbors seen him? He’d been careful, but he couldn’t control everything. Someone might have seen him. More than one someone, possibly. If he shot Conrad now, the body wouldn’t disintegrate - he hadn’t had “real” blood. He would be a body, and she would be a witness, along with anyone else who heard her shouting in the hallway.
He needed to be anonymous. He could not afford a mistake like -
The door smashed open, slamming against the wall, and something blue and wolflike and skeletal boiled through the opening with a snarl. Its aura burned, the magic spilling over his skin like biting insects, and Abner fired twice, falling back to the table, the shots loud in the quiet apartment. The wolf thing looked at him, sneered, and was suddenly small.
“You can’t kill me like that,” the girl said flatly. She reached out and shut the door, which didn’t quite fit anymore, and Abner groped in his pocket for his silver bullets as the smell of cordite seared his nose.
The girl - Toni, of course, she’d said it was Toni - ignored him. The moment the door was closed, she was on the couch, reaching out to touch the vampire’s wasted face. “Oh, Connie. Oh, baby, what’ve you done?”
There was no liquid in him. Conrad couldn’t cry, but he shook his head once, minutely, and tried to pull back. “It wasn’t me. It was the blood. You shouldn’t be here -“
Toni smiled gently, stroking his hair. “My silly boy. It’s okay. Here.” She sat up straighter and swept her long, dark ponytail to one side, tilting her head just as Worth had. “Hurry up.”
Abner gave up on the silver and said loudly, gun up and trained on Conrad, “I can’t allow that.”
The look Toni gave him was blacker than Worth’s, gaze snapping with anger. “Worth told me you’d try to stop me. Get out of here while you still can.”
Abner didn’t move. His hand was steady. “Feeding on people is not allowed. He knows he can’t touch you. And you may kill me, but he’ll be dead first.”
Toni glared. Her hand moved down, deliberately covering one of Conrad’s. “Is a vampire ‘people’? Could he feed on another vampire?”
Conrad moaned, agonized. “Toni, please -“
Abner stared hard, sensing a trap. “Why would it want to? There’s no nutrition in vampire blood. It’s already dead.”
“But he could,” Toni insisted. “Because he’s not ‘people’.”
“There’s no point to this conversation.” Abner cocked the weapon. “Move away, Miss. Humans are off limits.”
“But that’s the point exactly.” Toni grinned, feral and unpleasant. Her teeth seemed to fill her mouth, longer and sharper than human teeth, and her hair lifted, prickling in its own wind of power, the blue streaks flaring. Her voice was deeper, rougher. “I’m not human.”
The air in the room was suddenly heavy and hard to breathe. Abner couldn’t move, and it had nothing to do with Toni’s magic.
Not human.
“He needs to feed from something living. You’re lucky he didn’t pick you. But then - you’re human.”
The vampire hadn’t eaten him because he was human?
His mind spiraled through confusing channels, lost. People ate cows. Wolves ate deer. Birds ate insects. Everything ate something else, that was Nature’s way. But wolves weren’t killed unless they overcame their food source. Birds weren’t killed hardly at all. If vampires kept themselves in check, if they fed on a population that could not be exhausted, that was not human -
He watched as Toni bared her throat to the vampire and patted his hand, her voice gentle and feminine again, though her eyes were still on the vampire hunter. “Come on, honey. You can’t hurt me. Drink.”
Conrad’s eyes were on Toni’s dark skin, fixated. “But he’ll -“
“He won’t do anything,” Toni said. “He doesn’t have a reason.”
Toni was not human. Conrad was not human.
Dreamily, Conrad murmured, “You smell like…”
“I know.”
Abner felt pressure against his leg, and knew it was Paradox. The ferret clambered up his partner, settling on Abner’s shoulder, nuzzling reassuringly against his cheek, small noises bubbling out of him. After a moment, Abner reached up with his free hand and touched Paradox’s warm body. His gun dropped.
Toni nodded slightly, turned fully to the vampire, and pressed his face to her throat.
Conrad gave in.
THE END.
Thanks for reading~! To be truthful, I have more I wrote after this - what happened to Toni after Conrad was through with her, what Abner did about it, how Conrad and Abner said good-bye - but it turned out to be superfluous. The point of the story was Abner’s coming to terms with Conrad in Conrad’s entirety, and that’s where I left it. I’m sorry if anyone was disappointed by the lack of, erm, intimacies between characters. Take consolation in the fact that I reaaaaally wanted to pair Conrad up. ; ^ ;
… maybe I’ll do it anyways. But later.
Hope you enjoyed!